Poetry
by TheYmp
Summary: The poetic yearnings of Sam Winchester: a comedy. Set prior to season 15. Written for the 2018 Supernatural Spring Fling on LiveJournal.


**Disclaimer: I don't own **_**Supernatural**_** or its characters - these were created by Eric Kripke - I'm just borrowing them. I'm not making any commercial gain. No harm or infringement intended.**

_**The poetic yearnings of Sam Winchester: a comedy. **_**Sam/Castiel. Set prior to season 15.**

**Written for the 2018 Supernatural Spring Fling on LiveJournal. Septembers_coda's prompts were: **_**Sam/Cas, "Misplaced/misinterpreted love letter", and "Poetry turns out to work even better than the grenade launcher"**_**.**

~#~

**Poetry**

**_"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words" - Robert Frost_**

Research was normally Sam's thing, but today it just wasn't working for him. He shook his head in a vain attempt to try to clear his woolly thoughts. He guessed he just wasn't feeling it.

Certainly, it wasn't the location; the combination of library and home couldn't have come much closer to his idea of perfection (and the fact it also met his brother's criteria of creature comforts mixed with bat cave was the icing on the cake).

As for the company, well, he hadn't even felt the need to roll his eyes at something Dean had done since breakfast...

At that thought, his gaze darted once more across the room, seemingly sucked into the sight of said brother and Castiel conferring in yet another of their intense, private arguments.

Whatever the subject of their conversation, it had Dean chuckling and shaking his head, but Castiel sitting, if anything, even more ramrod straight than usual with his shoulders set square in a manner that clearly broadcast he would brook no further discussion.

_Cas_, Sam sighed wistfully to himself as, elbow on desk, he let his head rest heavily on his hand. _Oh, Castiel_.

Elizabeth Barret Browning's words came to mind:

**_"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.  
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach..."_**

The angel's dark hair was artfully mussed as if by a hurricane (_or a roll in the hay,_ Sam's mind supplied lasciviously). Sam shivered at the sight of Castiel's haughty gaze turning on Dean as he argued his point, his angry eyes alive with passion, a scintillating, ice blue, like a sudden lightning storm on an otherwise bright, spring day.

**_"And all should cry, Beware! Beware!  
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!"_**

The lines from Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_ crashed uninvited through his mind.

"Magnificent," Sam sighed, clearing his throat in embarrassment on realizing he'd spoken the word aloud. Cheeks still burning a ruddy red, he resumed his surreptitious admiration from a distance, mostly relieved that no one seemed to have noticed his slip.

_Who better to be smitten with than an angel?_ he pondered. _Smiting's what they do_. Sam had realized his infatuation at the first, admittedly bumpy, moment he'd set eyes on Castiel, given the way his stomach churned, other parts of his anatomy stirred, and how the hair on his arms and the back of his neck had stood up. His body was like an antenna, reaching up and out to tune in to Castiel's wavelength.

He'd tried to push those feelings down. The mother of all brush-offs had helped (having your crush routinely refer to you as 'abomination' tended to cool one's ardor), plus he'd seen how his brother and Castiel had stared at each other; you'd have to have been blind not to.

_Is it too much to want someone to look at me like that? Well, maybe someone who has a mystical nine lives thing going on, given the way I seem to get everyone I care about killed_. He still had the occasional nightmare about Jess, and the pain of what might have been with Eileen was fresh in his mind a scant year after her death. He knew it was selfish, but he couldn't help but think how this was just the latest installment of heartbreak in his Shakespearean tragedy of a love-life.

**_"Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,_****  
****_But bears it out even to the edge of doom."_**

_No, I'm definitely the sidekick in someone else's epic love story_, he thought mournfully, doodling grandiose declarations of devotion on the legal pad before him. Not that it helped. 'The heart wants what the heart wants' and he was a big guy with a big heart so that was a lot of _want_. In those early days, knowing it could never happen, he'd luxuriated in the wrongness of his life choices and he'd wallowed in demonic blood like some kind of satanic hippo. Now, once more, he was wallowing in his own self-pity.

Sam jolted back to the present on noticing his brother coming towards him. He made a nonchalant act of slipping his notes of yearning between the pages of a treatise on the ancient muses. There was nowhere safer, he considered, to keep his adolescent ramblings from Dean's prying gaze.

"I'm gonna make a store run," he announced suddenly getting to his feet and desperately needing some fresh air.

~#~

Dean picked up the book that Sam had seemed so focused on, what with all the cover stroking, sighing and furious bouts of writing. He hefted the weighty tome back and forth from one hand to the other. He'd been told not to judge a book by its cover, but his own experience had certainly never proved that saying to be true. It looked _boring_, and he had far better things he'd rather be doing; it'd been _days_ since he'd last had a chance to wash and wax Baby.

"Here Cas, I think you better read through this. Something tells me it's important."

The angel looked fondly upon his charge and took the book reverently with both hands.

"I'll get right on it," Castiel smiled, unperturbed by the swift departure of the eldest Winchester.

A loose sheet of paper slipped from the book and, as he reached down to retrieve it, he noticed it was a poem; the handwriting in the usual barely-legible scrawl employed by both of the Winchester brothers.

**_You stand so proud, unyielding,  
Illuminated from within.  
All love and fury of the universe focused,  
Like gazing upon the face of the sun._**

**_You strike, smite,  
I'm knocked down by your grace.  
Already fallen,  
Gladly I would fall again._**

**_I desire all, to take and taste and know,  
And be known in return.  
Should I fear the lightning,  
or the passing of this storm?_**

**_Eyes flash, lips spark,  
Two battle-weary warriors clash on silken fields.  
To the victor the spoils!  
There are no losers here._**

**_So arise, my love, my beloved.  
Mutual submission to willing embrace,  
Ardor spilling over,  
Eternal promises made flesh._**

"Oh no," Castiel whispered, falling back in his chair both stunned and somewhat aroused. Poetry, it turned out, worked even better than Dean's grenade launcher at knocking an angel from his feet.

He was embarrassed and shocked by the passion behind the words. The literary allusions were frankly pornographic and he barely recognized himself from the description, although he couldn't help but preen a little. Any hesitancy at thinking the subject of the poem was himself was dissuaded by the way his name was obsessively written over and over again across the rest of the page.

He'd never realized that Dean felt like that about him, certainly the feeling wasn't reciprocated.

_But would it make Dean happy?_

_No!_ He shook himself. He'd held Dean's soul within his grace while reassembling the man's body one molecule at a time until essentially _giving birth_ to him. _It would be wrong!_

Tucking the paper into his trench coat he attempted to compose himself in preparation for letting Dean down gently.

~#~

"You know, you're very important to me," said Castiel carefully, apropos of nothing.

"You're very important to me, too," Dean chuckled, seemingly happy to take any excuse to look away from his book, although his forehead creased in confusion. "You're like a brother to me."

"Yes!" cried Castiel eagerly. A sudden thought occurred to him; some of the scurrilous things intimated years back by Zachariah about the Winchesters and some aspects of the boys' close relationships that had been seized on by many of the fan fiction he'd read online before finally abandoning it as far too traumatizing. "Er, no. Maybe not _brothers_," he muttered.

"Oh," said Dean in surprise, apparently connecting the dots of all that Castiel had left unspoken. His face and neck flushed furiously to the tips of his ears.

"Friends," said Castiel. "_Best_ friends," he added reassuringly, on noticing Dean's apparent agitation.

"Yep, you're my best friend, yes," replied Dean briskly. "We should have a beer and talk about sports some time," he said, slapping the angel manfully on the shoulder.

"I would like that," breathed Castiel, wary of further crushing his charge's feelings.

"Good talk," Dean added, before rushing from the room.

_Humans are so complicated. Couldn't Chuck just have left them as fish?_ Castiel sighed as he considered his next step.

~#~

"I think Cas is in love with me," hissed Dean.

Something heaved within Sam and for one, too-long moment he was sure he was going to throw up. He swallowed past the sour taste in his mouth and tried to compose himself.

Dean proceeded to unburden himself with a whole litany of things that Castiel had supposedly said or done in confessing his undying love and devotion. _Or something_, thought Sam. Given the sudden big bass drum pounding in his chest and the high-pitched whistling of the wind in his ears, it was difficult for Sam to concentrate on _anything_ his brother may or may not have been saying.

"Are you even listening to a word I'm saying?" repeated Dean as Sam's mental fog momentarily lifted.

"No," moaned Sam, barely audible to even himself.

"What?" asked Dean, clearly scandalized by Sam's response to the unburdening of his soul.

"No, he can't be," Sam whined, a little louder as his whole world collapsed around him.

"I need you to talk to him," said Dean, seizing the opportunity. "You two seem to get on. I mean, you seem to understand what he's going on about." He shook his head ruefully, already decided. "Half the time I've no idea what's going on in his head..." He snorted as he locked eyes with Sam. "Or yours!" he added, before disappearing at speed through the door and out of Sam's room.

Sam collapsed face down on his bed and whimpered. It was one thing to know your infatuation didn't reciprocate your feelings, but a new level of cruelty for the universe to assign him as matchmaker between that crush and his own brother.

~#~

"I think Dean is in love with me," whispered Castiel urgently, casting a sidelong glance at the man in question who was sitting on the other side of the library.

Sam's chest tightened at the words, crushing his heart to a pulp and squeezing his lungs so he could scarcely breathe.

**_The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;  
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;  
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.  
For nothing now can ever come to any good._**

Thinking on W.H. Auden wasn't helping; Sam now had an overwhelming urge to smash something-_the whole damned world, say_-and so it was probably lucky for all that it'd been a few years since he'd last wielded dark powers.

He concentrated on maintaining his breathing as his vision slowly started to come back into focus around him. _I can do this_, he urged. _For Castiel, for Dean... for me, _he thought as bittersweet words by Christina Rossetti danced through his mind.

**_Better by far you should forget and smile  
Than that you should remember and be sad._**

"I'm sure you'll make each other very happy," Sam said, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

"No," cried Castiel.

Sam blinked.

"They're beautiful words," said Castiel. "But I don't feel that way... about Dean," he added, taking a many-folded sheet of paper from his pocket and gazing at the writing upon it. He flushed and looked away.

"Oh," said Sam in a faint voice, feeling uncharacteristically small and very foolish.

~#~

"You thought me and Cas were really together?" asked Dean incredulously.

"Well, maybe not _together_ together," gestured Sam awkwardly. "But it seemed you were working you're way up to it."

"Dude, have you seen how much I drink?" laughed Dean. "I've not been up to _anything_, I can assure you."

"Oh," said Sam simply, before the meaning dawned on him. "Ew, that's too much info. You know, you really oughta cut out the booze."

"Yeah, yeah, I was _joking_," said Dean, rolling his eyes. "Anyway," he added peevishly. "What would make you think I'd be into dudes?"

Sam sighed. "Why not? It's no reflection on your masculinity..." he trailed off, losing he train of thought as Castiel joined them in the library. He broke into a shy grin, while his mind wandered with Walt Whitman,

**_The male is not less the soul nor more, he too is in his place,  
He too is all qualities, he is action and power,  
The flush of the known universe is in him,_**

Dean groaned. "Sheesh, you've got it _bad_." He waved aside Sam's stuttered apology. "Forget it. I'm gonna go make myself scarce for a while. A _long_ while." He gave Sam a friendly shove in Castiel's direction. "Go get him, tiger."

Sam nodded his thanks, but his attention was already focused solely on his angel. He gazed at Castiel lovingly.

As Castiel gazed back, Sam knew he was truly home.

**_"His mouth is sweetness itself; he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved" - Song of Songs 5:16_**

**THE END**

**(;,;)**


End file.
